Weekend in Berkeley, PART 1

It was a very fun weekend in Berkeley. 

We left Santa Barbara in Mikey’s car around 9:30 am on Friday morning. The drive up was pretty long, about 5 and a half hours, but it was also full of beautiful landscapes.

On the way up, we stopped to have lunch at In-N-Out and I tried Animal Style fries for the first time… They are not bad, but I think the burgers are a tastier way to gain 700 calories!

We arrived at Mikey’s house in the afternoon and I had a chance to meet his family. Both Mikey and his family are such wonderful people. They all are very nice and super fun to be with.






Mikey, in particular, is one of my best friends. He is my housemate, and he is the guy who rescued me from my old living situation, which I did not like at all. When I first moved to Isla Vista, I found a living situation that I thought looked appealing but soon turned out to be a bad fit. I was about to give up on moving, and I remember I even called my previous landlord to ask if I could move back in.

But the very next day was when I met Mikey, and I immediately had the feeling I would have liked living with him.
After only one month of living together, I feel like I’ve known Mikey for years, and we have developed a wonderful friendship based on mutual respect, similar traits and interests, and a genuine sense of brotherhood. 

Mikey’s new house in Orinda (a town right next to Berkeley) is really beautiful and spacious, and Mikey and his younger brother Maddy often have friends over. On Friday afternoon, after we arrived, we hung out in the yard for a while, and then we went to buy sandwiches for dinner at Mikey’s favorite sandwich place.


Mikey drove his father’s car and it was definitely a fun ride! I really like sport cars and I asked Mikey not to play any music because the sound of the engine sounds like music to me!

On Friday night we went to Berkeley to visit some of his old fiends, and I got a chance to meet with my own old friend Alessandro. He used to be a student at Santa Barbara City College, and this is his first year at UC Berkeley. He got accepted into the prestigious Haas School of Business, to which I have applied too. He joined a fraternity and he is very happy with his decision, because he says that joining a frat allowed his to make friends and start building a network of connections fast. If I get accepted to Haas, I will consider joining his frat, too. Alessandro is a very ambitious student, and he is like me in many ways. In fact, while he is a little older, our paths have been similar, with the both of us being SBCC students from Italy, and being involved in similar extracurriculars and classes. Alessandro has helped me by giving me advice from his own experience, and he is one of my dearest friends. 

Read about the rest of my weekend in Berkeley in my next blog post!